Co-founders Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley took to the stage today at New York City's Social Media Week to talk about the company's approach to sharing content and, yes, snappy headlines. Given Upworthy's upbeat mission to "share things that matter." how does the not-so-gentle ribbing make its founders feel?

Pretty great, it turns out.

"There definitely was a backlash," Koechley said in response to the inevitable headline question, but as a former managing editor for The Onion, he knew how to put in perspective.

"You actually have to reach a certain level of saturation to be the premise for a joke," he said. "So when the parodies started we thought, 'Oh we made it. We can now be parodied.'"

Upworthy has been working to take the focus off its headline aesthetic and put it on the attention it drives to issues ranging from domestic violence to sustainable energy. To that end, it recently started measuring — and asking to be judged by — attention minutes, the time users spend with the content that Upworthy curates (here's the company's post on the topic).

According to the numbers made available by Upworthy, site visitors spent 7 million attention minutes on the site per day in the fourth quarter of 2013, or roughly 13 years.

“Headlines can draw people into a piece of content," Pariser said, "But it's impossible to make something go viral unless people really want to share it."

Alex is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist. He writes about media entrepreneurs and creatives for Upstart Business Journal.

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